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Arepa!Arepa!Arepa! (aka GoodGobbleBlog aka Grub aka Jules and Bailey) have gone from strength to strength since I attended their inaugural supper club last January. After outgrowing their dining room they’ve taken over the kitchen at BrewDog and moved their supper clubs to Trove in Levenshulme. I missed the first one but made sure I got tickets to their Christmas event …

Are we all bored of Top Ten lists yet? Me too, but that’s not going to stop me doing my own. At least my ‘Awards’ are a little different; most are just a list of three – Bronze, Silver & Gold if you like – although a few of them I just couldn’t narrow down so contain five. There have been …

It’s beginning to look a lot like.. okay, it already looks a LOT like Christmas because apparently it’s happening in two days time. Whether I’m ready or not. At the start of December I hatched grand plans to visit the restaurants of Manchester sampling the very best festive food on offer. As it happened, I had no time for such fun. Just …

There are countless Italian restaurants in Manchester but unless you like dining with footballers wives there aren’t that many good ones. In fact, I haven’t eaten at one since Italia early last year and that’s sadly no longer with us. I’d never visited a ‘Gusto’ before – a chain of Italian restaurants by Living Ventures with branches in cities including Liverpool and …

It never ceases to amaze me how many offers I get from PR companies to cover things on this little blog – which I write primarily for my own amusement. These days most get deleted immediately but occasionally something grabs my attention. Like recently when I was contacted on behalf of Premier Inn who’ve just opened a new hotel in …

It’s well known that Solita is one of my favourite restaurants; besides the great food it’s the fact that they never stop changing and improving that I love most. Blink and you might miss an amazing special, don’t return for a few months and you’re likely to find a completely refreshed menu next time. It wasn’t even six months ago …

It’s no secret that I’m a huge fan of the Drunken Butcher and his supper clubs. I’ve eaten his food more times than I can remember over the last year (luckily I wrote about much of it here so I don’t have to). Recently he’s been getting quite refined and producing more accomplished and technical dishes, but the thing that first attracted me to his food was rustic …

It’s ever so slightly awkward being asked to visit somewhere you’ve previously been fairly negative about. It happened recently when I was invited to Momentum Restaurant & Lounge in Westhoughton. I’m assuming they hadn’t read my less than glowing review anyway. Still, it was over two years ago and my complaints were all service related. I was impressed by the food back then so thought it’d be …

These days I get just as excited about good beer as I do food. I bought my tickets for not one but three sessions of Indy Man Beer Con (Independent Manchester Beer Convention) as soon as they went on sale in Spring and spent the next six months counting down the days. I’d booked onto Jackie Kearney’s (aka The Hungry Gecko) beer …

I’ve been to many supper clubs this year but they’ve always been run by individuals, usually in their own homes. Somewhat different from an event I attended recently; a supper club in an actual restaurant, with food cooked by a celebrity chef and hosted by a national government! The ‘Malaysian Banquet’ was hosted by Malaysia Kitchen – a programme aimed …

There was nothing romantic about Valentine’s Day 2012 for me. The date of my worst ever experience as a food blogger at Taps in Manchester’s Great Northern. I swore I’d never return; something I stuck to for two and a half years, even when asked directly by the restaurant. When I did go back last month it wasn’t because I was asked …

I’ve eaten plenty of piri piri chicken in my time and not all at Nando’s either, much of it in Portugal. Sadly it’s often disappointing though, even in its native land it can be dry and flavourless. So on my last trip I was determined to find the best piri piri chicken in Portugal and I think I actually did! It was …

The more popular this blog has become the more emails I receive from PR agencies. Often they want me to sell my soul for an egg cup or a packet of biscuits. Sometimes they’re invites to places I wouldn’t dream of going, sometimes they’re invites to nice events and sometimes they’re just news. I hardly ever do anything with the ‘just news’ …

If you’d told me in the late 90’s that I’d be making regular trips to bowling alleys in 15 years time, I wouldn’t have believed you for a second. I wasn’t very good at bowling admittedly but mainly because of the types of places we had available back then. You know those bright, garish mainstream chains – usually on retail parks – full …

Driving back to our apartment after a day of swimming, crazy golf and feeding Llamas at the rather odd Krazy World Zoo in Algoz, we stumbled upon Restaurante Sobretempero. It’s easy to miss though, as from the outside it looks more like a convenience store than a restaurant. But I’m glad we found it, as it turned out to be one …